Hate crimes are criminal actions intended to harm or intimidate people because of
their race, ethnicity, sexual orientation, religion, or other minority group status.
They are also referred to as bias crimes.

Since the 1980s, the problem of hate crimes has attracted increasing research attention,
especially from criminologists and law enforcement personnel who have focused
primarily on documenting the prevalence of the problem and formulating
criminal justice responses to it.

This section of the site reports data from Dr. Herek's national survey of
lesbian, gay, and bisexual adults.
It is the first study to document the extent of hate crime victimization in a nationally
representative sample of sexual minority adults.

Also reported here are data from the first large-scale study of the psychological impact
of hate crimes based on sexual orientation.
These data show that lesbian and gay hate crime survivors manifested more symptoms of psychological
distress than lesbian and gay survivors of "random" assaults in the same time period.

Learn more about Dr. Herek's national survey and download a
preprint of the published paper reporting the study's main results.